Download The Zionist Idea

The Zionist Idea
Arthur Hertzberg
The modern chapter of Jewish history began with the grant of full citizenship to the
Jews in France as a result of the Revolution of 1789. By accepting equality, and by
making his chief political policy in the next century the striving to attain it
everywhere, the Jew had to do more than remake himself as an individual in the
image of a proper westerner. Napoleon I may have called a new Sanhedrin to Paris in
1807, in a characteristically theatrical gesture, for reasons of domestic policy, to
appease anti-Semitism in the eastern provinces of France, and perhaps even in a not
too well-defined hope of becoming the new Cyrus in the mind of all Jewry, which
might therefore rally to his imperialist ambitions. Nonetheless, what happened in this
comic-opera setting was profoundly important. The bourgeois revolution and the
nation-state, within fifteen years of coming to power, ordered the Jews to appear for a
religious disputation. In the Middle Ages, the accuser in such all to frequent debates
had been Christianity; it was now the monolithic state. The rather undistinguished
assemblage of rabbis and Jewish notables who gathered to Paris from France and Italy
(largely under police pressure) to accept the challenge did, indeed, shout themselves
hoarse in protestation of loyalty to the Emperor and of their indissoluble unity of spirit
with all other citizens of the two major kingdoms of their master's realm. They
formally took the historically inevitable step of proclaiming that the civil law of the
state, and its military needs, were to override all contrary prescriptions of Jewish
religious law and ritual. But the Sanhedrin insisted that it was granting away only the
political laws of Judaism, "which were intended to rule the people of Israel in
Palestine when it possessed its own kings, priests, and judges". The religious laws,
however, "are by their nature, absolute and independent of circumstance and time".1
In the here and now, the Jew is to allow nothing to stand between him and his full
1
Décisions doctrinales du Grand Sanhedrin, Paris, 1812, p. 8.
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duty and devotion to the state which has emancipated him, but in the realm of faith he
will maintain the concept of his chosenness and his dream of the Messiah.
This defensive distinction between civic duty and religion, which means the severing
of the religious and national elements of Judaism, was to have a long career in the
nineteenth century. In its Orthodox form – which was what the majority of the
rabbinic leaders of the Sanhedrin had undoubtedly intended – it meant a marriage
between punctilious observance of the Law and maintaining the hope of the Prophets
for a miraculous "end of days", on the one hand, and outward assimilation to the
surrounding secular life and culture, on the other. This was the version of the idea that
was given currency by Samson Raphael Hirsch, the dominant voice of west European
neo-Orthodoxy in religion in the middle of the nineteenth century. Reform Judaism,
the important new movement that arose in that era, denied that such absolute
obedience to the commandments of the tradition was either possible, in the light of the
obligations imposed by equal citizenship, or intellectually defensible before the bar of
rational criticism of the religious heritage. It, therefore, defined the religion of the Jew
as an ethical creed, the moral heritage of the Bible. The traditional hope for the return
to Zion could not be allowed to remain in the liturgy as even a pious dream, for its
presence might call into question the unqualified loyalty of the Jew to the state. It was
replaced by the doctrine of the "mission of Israel", the belief that the Jews had been
dispersed in the world by a beneficent Providence to act as its teachers and its guides
toward the ideals of justice and righteousness revealed in the Bible. Nay more, the
Messiah was now to be identified with the vision of an age of individual liberty and
universal peace – i.e., with the progressive faith of the first half of the nineteenth
century.2
Israel retained its mission and its divine election because it had long ago
been given by revelation perfect knowledge of the values which human reason and the
unfolding of the historic process were just beginning to approximate.3
The most radical expressions of the Reform rabbinic conferences in Germany in the
1840's had, thus, stretched the category of religion to the utmost; it had been burdened
with the entire weight of acting as the guarantor of the survival of the Jews as a
separate entity. In pure logic it was equally possible to do the same with the category
of nationhood, and to do it with much less shock to Jewish mass sensitivity. The
2
The difference between this modernist version of Jewish messianism and the Zionist formulation,
which is obviously related to it, will be discussed later in this essay.
3
See David Philipson, The Reform Movement in Judaism, New York, 1931, pp. 174-80, in re the three
rabbinical conferences between 1846 and 1848 which defined these doctrines.
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question bluntly posed by Napoleon, whether the Jew, once emancipated, would be
unreservedly loyal to the state, could still be answered affirmatively. It could be
maintained that Jewish nationality was not a political affair, the identity of a nation in
exile in practical search of its restoration, but that of a unique spiritual community.
Whatever concessions needed to be made from the ancient way of life as the price of
civic and intellectual entry into the modern world could be validated by the principle
of the organic unity of the national spirit beneath forms that change from age to age.
This was the view of Zechariah Frankel, who walked out of one of the founding
conferences of German Reform Judaism in protest against the over-sharp theological
rationalism of the majority. Its best-known exponent was Heinrich Graetz, who wrote
his great history of the Jews to illustrate this thesis.
Such a solution had several virtues. In the first place, it removed the problem of how
to make Judaism live in the modern world from the realm of theological dispute, for
the actually existing community rather than some creed yet to be defined was made
into the absolute. Both conservatism and liberalism in religion, or even the
substitution of folk culture for religion, could be harmonized with the principle of
nationhood. But, beyond these theoretical virtues, the national definition of the
modern Jew began to come to the foreground in the 1840's because it was consonant
with the atmosphere of the times. This was the springtime of romantic nationalism,
the age of the Revolution of 1848 and its aftermath, during which Germany and Italy
were unified and all the other nationalities of Europe were struggling, with varying
degrees of success, for their freedom. A national definition of Judaism was now
necessary; it had to be claimed that, in this classical period before the exile, the Jew
had already created a society which was the prefiguring, the advance revelation by the
Spirit of History, of the age now laboring to be born. Modern Jewish nationalism, too,
thus begins with the problem of redefinition that had been posed by the Emancipation;
it shares with its greatest immediate enemy – religious Reform – in being essentially
defensive, in the need that is common to both to save some rarefied "island within"
for Jewish life outside the storms of contemporary history.
What is here being argued is that Reform and early Jewish nationalism, the first stage
of modern Zionism, new and radical though they were, did not really break the
inherited molds of Jewish history. The pattern had already been laid down two
millennia before, when Philo of Alexandria, the first great apologist for Judaism,
answered the challenge of Hellenistic philosophy and religion. The world to which he
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felt it necessary to respond was not the official polytheism or the popular mystery
religions, but the highest expression of non-Jewish culture, the thought of the neoPlatonists. His answer was in two parts: he affirmed a deeper, hidden and allegorical,
sense to Scripture than could be perceived by the traditionalists, and he then found
that ths essential meaning of the Revelation contained exactly those doctrines which
the philosophers were laboriously discovering by the use of reason.4 This basic
solution, to reformulate Judaism in modern terms and then set it up as the valid
ancestors and superior of modernity, is exactly what Maimonides, in his turn, did in
the twelfth century, with Aristotelian philosophy.5 It is the typical pattern of medieval
Jewish – and Christian and Moslem – apologetics, the well-trod path on which the
various initial responses to the Emancipation could walk with some confidence.
Nonetheless, despite the best efforts of the first two generations of Jewish thinkers
after the dawn of the era of Emancipation, their several varieties of apologetics could
not really meet in full either the political or the intellectual challenge of the new age.
To discuss politics first: In the past, Jewry had always dealt with changes in its
relationship to its rulers by viewing the new, which was usually the worse, as a
gezerah, a destiny to be accepted with resignation. It even knew that certain
infringements of its inner life were the price of survival. There are examples in
medieval Jewish history of communities which had to march to church week after
week for centuries to hear sermons against their faith. The ghetto knew that its
representatives before the powers that be (the shtadlanim) would sometimes, and
perhaps even often, have to conduct themselves in personal disregard of the Laws of
the Torah. Nonetheless, despite such exceptions, the inner quality of the life of the
Jewish masses prior to the Emancipation was of one piece; Israel, at once a universal
religion and the destiny of a particular folk, was serving out in faithfulness the
divinely appointed term of the exile.
Post-Emancipation Jewish thought did indeed attempt to deal with the new legal
equality and its corollary, the entry of the Jew into western society, as a Gezerah.
Yehudah Leib Gordon, the greatest figure and the summation of the Russian Jewish
Haskalah (Enlightenment), reflects it in his version of the answer: "Be a Jew in your
home, and a man outside" – and, in his slogan, he represented the essential meaning
of the theories both of Reform and of cultural nationalism, which were the immediate
4
See Harry A. Wolfson, Philo, Cambridge, 1947, p. 19.
See Isaac Hussik, A History of Medieval Jewish Philosophy, Philadelphia, 1916, p. 240.
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5
sources of his thought. In fact, there is considerable evidence (which I hope to present
in another context) that such a reaction to the mode of Gezerah was the first, almost
instinctive feeling of the Jewish masses when first confronted by the new equality
after 1789. In this attitude we can find the underlying reason why all the stresses of
the last century and a half have not produced a schism in Jewry. So long as it could be
imagined that the new theories about Judaism and the newly secularized patterns of
living were essentially defensive, that they were retreats before the outside world and
not a real inner turning to an heretical ideal, Jewish feeling cold ultimately allow them
a considerably increased amount of the kind of latitude it had always reserved for its
contacts with the non-Jewish world.
But it was unmistakably evident that history was denying Gordon's formula the kind
of meaning he intended. The "outside" was no longer a place for more or less regular
sojourns by a few and enforced short visits by the many. It was, wherever
emancipation was in process, the most of life, affecting the entire mass of Jewry, and
all that could be hoped for was that the "home" would not be completely forgotten. So
radical a reversal in the ration between the specifically Jewish and the general
experience of even those "good Jews" who wished to be modern men could not really
be understood in terms of political categories which were rooted in the past.
The intellectual challenge was equally unprecedented. From the beginning of the
modern age, there were significant segments of the intelligentsia which did not
content themselves with any of the newly fashioned apologies for Judaism. They
accepted the ideals of the "outside" – liberalism, nationalism, and later, socialism –
not because they had supposedly originated in Judaism but because they had not.
What made these values attractive was that they promised to fashion a new secular
world which would transcend and destroy all aspects of "medievalism". The
assimilationists, those Jews who consciously strove to give up their own identity
entirely in order to become undifferentiated individuals in the modern world, were
thus truly messianic. The very completeness and unconditionality of their surrender to
the dominant values of the majority were a program for the final solution of the
Jewish question: let the Jew become like everybody else, yielding up his claim to
chosenness and being relieved of his role as scapegoat. Let society rn on its universal
and immutable principles, rooted in reason and natural law, which know neither
positive nor negative exceptions for the Jew. Above all, let him disappear from the
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center of the stage, his own and the world's to be one among many equally important
small incidents in the history of mankind.
This was a kind of messianism that could have arisen only out of the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment, for it was fundamentally at variance with both the Jewish and
the Christian concepts of such an age. The centrality of the Jew to the messianic
vision of Judaism has been described earlier in this essay. What needs to be added
here is that, in reality, he is equally important to the traditional Christian version of
the "end of days": he is not chosen but damned, but that is negative chosenness; he is
doomed to wandering and suffering, because he once rejected Jesus, but the
indispensable preamble to the Second Coming and the "end of days" is his
conversion.
It beyond doubt that the long-standing Christian desire to convert the Jews was a
significant aspect of the climate of opinion toward the end of the eighteenth century
which prepared the ground for their emancipation. Liberal Christians believed that
this would be a short cut to the devoutly desired result. So the Abbé Grégoire, the
leader of this school of thought in revolutionary France, argued in a famous essay
written in 1787 and published two years later, as the delegates were gathering to the
meeting of the Estates-General in Paris, that "the granting of religious liberty to the
Jews would be a great step forward in reforming and, I even dare say, in converting
them, for truth is most persuasive when it is gentle".6 What is even more apparent is
that many of the philosophies of the Enlightenment, despite the ethical universalism
and the vague deism or atheism in religion with which they were consciously
subverting Christianity, were most reluctant to part with "old-fashioned" antiSemitism. In fear of censorship and the Bastille, they may, indeed, have to shoot their
arrows of ridicule at Moses instead of the Apostles, in order to conduct their war
against the Church in Aesopian language; but there is an edge and a nastiness to
Voltaire's comments on the Jews, an insistence that it is hardly conceivable that even
reason can reform them,7 which sets one of the patterns for modern anti-Semitism: to
uphold a universal and secular ideal – e.g., liberalism, nationalism, or socialism – but
to exclude the Jews from its purview and effect.
6
M. Grégoire, Essai sur la regeneration physique, morale et politique des Juifs, Metz, 1789, p. 123.
The most recent study of this subject is the essay of Isaac E. Barzilay, "The Jew in the Literature of
the Enlightenment", Jewish Social Studies, XVIII (1956), pp. 243-61.
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7
Nonetheless, at its most ideologically consistent, the Enlightenment proposed full
acceptance of the Jew in the new society of which it dreamed. His faults – which even
pro-Jewish writers like Dohm, Mirabeau, and Grégoire waxed eloquent in describing
– were, they maintained, not innate but caused by his unfortunate estate, and his
claims to chosenness could be disregarded as a psychological defense the Jew found it
necessary to cultivate to relieve the misery of his enslavement. All this would
disappear, transmuted into good civisme even among this, the most difficult group to
usher into the life of the modern world, once all of society is reformed. It is therefore
true, as Nordau once observed, that the Emancipation came to the Jews not out of
humanitarian fervor, not as a reconciliation of age-old conflicts, but for the sake of the
abstractions, reason and natural law.8 But the Jewish enthusiasts of assimilation chose
to overlook that the Emancipation was not essentially conceived out of tender regard
for the Jews: they preferred to accept it with passion as the totally messianic era that it
purported to be.
Most of the reasons why the Jewish intelligentsia and higher bourgeoisie accepted the
Emancipation as an ultimate fulfillment are well known ("the career open to talent",
the opening of the door of society, etc.); but one, less obvious, consideration needs to
be added. For the first time anti-Semitism could be thought of in a rationalist
framework. Now, at last, its "cause" was known and its "cure", self-evident. It had
existed (to the new theory ran) in the late, "medieval" era because of religious
fanaticism. That age was now at an end, and in the new day of reason and progress it
must entirely disappear. In order really to believe in the Emancipation, the Jew could
not allow himself to imagine that anti-Semitism was a constant, beyond the dissolving
power of the new ideas of the Enlightenment, or, worse still, that it might find ways
of legitimizing itself in every theoretically universalist movement. And yet, Jewhatred continued to exist, and it was not merely a left-over from the past. Everyone,
including especially those Jews whose intellectual gods were Voltaire and the
Encyclopedists, knew that many of the makers of the new faith were themselves no
lovers of the seed of Abraham. Modern anti-Semitism, therefore, was described as a
new, reasonable, and even acceptable antipathy: it was chastisement for the sin of
imperfect assimilation and the goad toward the messianic day when the Jews, by
8
See text, Part 3.
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completely refashioning themselves in the image of proper westerners, would have
won the acceptance that they then would merit.
As the nineteenth century wore on, as the early universalism of the Enlightenment
was being replaced by the idea of a world which should be the peaceful concert of
liberated nations, it became possible intellectually, and historically necessary, for a
new version – a nationalist one – of this kind of thought to arise. Its immediate cause
was to be the obvious inadequacy of the assimilationist view of anti-Semitism, the
fact that bitter Jew-hatred persisted even where its objects were most completely deJudaized in life and spirit. And its answer would be to substitute Jewish nation for
Jewish individual in the messianic scheme above: the nation is to become like all
others, for its sin is that it is a national anomaly, and anti-Semitism is its chastisement.
The first statement of this theory is to be found not, as is usually imagined, in the
writings of its greatest exponents, Pinsker and Herzl. Its crucial point, the nationalist
redefinition of sin, occurs much earlier, in the 1840's, in the work of Alkalai, the halfforgotten Serbian rabbi and cabbalist of the old school, who was affected by the
Balkan nationalist struggles which surrounded him. He took the bold step of equating
the sin spoken of by the prophets not with the rebellion of the Jews against God but
with their lack of zeal for their national return to Zion.9
What has been said thus far, therefore, can be summarized into a basic typology of
Jewish responses to the Emancipation: they separate into the defensive and the
messianic. The first, the traditionalist, means the attempt to have the Jew live at once
in two worlds, his own, which continues the past as best it can, and the general life of
society. The second is the attempt to step outside his past into a really new age in
which that past is essentially irrelevant to him and is soon forgotten or ignored by the
majority which receives him. Each of these attitudes enters, in turn, into combination
with the two dominant ideas which came to the foreground in the French Revolution:
individualism and nationalism. As the nineteenth century continued its development
and brought forth such notions as socialism, in its several varieties, and the doctrine of
race, they were either assimilated or rejected by the various subgroups within this
typology to form more complex theories reflecting the reaction of the Jew to the
changing world around him.
9
See text, Part 1.
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The scheme that I am posing is, of course, not to be found represented with
mathematical precision by individual thinkers who can be quickly categorized in one
or the other of its cubbyholes, but it is, I believe, a description of the inherent logic of
the historic situation within which they were operation and a guide to understanding
it. A more important, indeed a crucial, qualification is that, by the very nature of such
a construction, its biases are intellectualist, for it deals more with ideas than directly
with life itself. Since the ultimate source of the turn into this thought-world is the
Enlightenment, we must remember the caution of the greatest modern student of the
intellectual roots of the French Revolution, Daniel Mornet: the protest which made
that explosion "aspired to social and political reforms for social and political, and not
for philosophic reasons; it expressed specific woes and needs, and not ideas".10
Visibly, society was being refashioned by radical ideals and revolutionary events;
beneath the surface, the old life, and the old attitudes and prejudices, went on.
What Mornet says of French society, the cradle of the modern European world, is
true, in large measure, of post-Emancipation Jewry – its mass attitudes, too, changed
much more slowly than those of its "official" thinkers – but with two important
qualifications. The historical tempest of the last century and a half have made and
destroyed many classes and nations, often with great rapidity, but not entire
community was refashioned as quickly and as radically, wherever it was emancipated,
as the Jewish. The attainment of legal equality affected the destiny of every individual
Jew directly and immediately, so that the time lag between the older attitudes that had
felt most at home in the ghetto and the newer ones that seemed in harmony with his
new status was considerably lessened. More important, no real base remained for a
Jewish "counterrevolution" against the Emancipation. If Mornet is right in
maintaining that revolutions are made by the hope of satisfying tangible needs,
counterrevolutions, despite their diffused appeal to conservative emotions, are
ultimately based on the real deprivations experienced by the losers in the struggle. In
this sense, the Emancipation was not a true revolt within Jewry, for it came from the
outside, and not as the result of an internal conflict, and it promised some benefit to
every segment of Jewish society. It is true that the degree to which the Jew integrated
himself into the world of the gentiles was directly related to the class structure, for the
upper socioeconomic echelons, the greatest immediate beneficiaries of the new
10
Daniel Mornet, Les origines intellectuelles de la revolution française, Paris, 1947, p. 465.
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opportunities, were the most assimilationist, and the petty bourgeoisie, who were the
last to gain anything, were the most persistently loyal to the values of the past. This is
why the traditionalist "defensive" theories of modern Jewish survival, in my use of the
term, tended to originate in the middle class, and the more radical, "messianic"
schools of thought were most often based on the experience of the newly educated,
westernized intelligentsia and the upper social echelons. But, in essence, all of these
doctrines accepted the Emancipation; the time lag in Jewish sentiment had no
historical base in a conviction held by any class that it had been better off, in this
world's goods, in the ghetto. It was entirely a psychological matter, a reluctance to
part with older values and a way of life which had been most at home within the now
fallen protective, though confining, walls of the ghetto.
There is another, perhaps even more important, observation that needs to be added in
assessing the role of the time lag of older attitudes, both their own and those of
society in general, in modern Jewish thought. The philosophical doctrines and
political changes which created a new age for the Jew were all movements at the top
of society, the cutting edge of its advance beyond the world that had been before. But,
in the upheavals of the modern age, the struggle for power has used many weapons,
among which ideas have been the most visible but not necessarily the most important.
So, for example, liberalism began as a vision of freedom for all humanity, but as soon
as the bourgeoisie, which was its bearer, came to power, it had no further use for this
revolutionary doctrine; humanitarianism persisted among its more ideologically
minded elements, the "reformers"' but the propulsion for further social change and the
extension of equality no longer came from the first paladins of liberalism.
Nationalism underwent a comparable process, as individual nations achieved, or came
within hailing distance, of their objectives; it, too, soon forgot any universalist
pretensions of the sort represented by Mazzini, when the unification of Italy was but a
dream, in favor of the conservative raison d'état of Cavour, as soon as it became a
reality. Victorious revolutions made it their first order of business to come to terms
with what had persisted – at least, on the plane emotion and belief – of the old order;
for it seems to be a "law" of history; after Robespierre comes the Thermidor, and the
religion of reason is succeeded by a concordat with the church. Modern Jewish
thought, however, could operate only by accepting the new ideas and political
experiments at their face value, for the old order had a long history of anti-Semitism.
As a result, after the various revolutions lost their initial élan, a conflict of interest
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ensued between the makers of the revolution and those Jews who accepted or
followed it. It was useful to the newly powerful to discard the label of subverters of
society and become legitimized as true heir of the past (e.g., Stalin's invoking of the
shades of the great warrior tsars in World War II); emancipated Jewry, on the other
hand, especially in its "messianic" segment, needed a utopia based on reason, i.e., it
required a true revolutionary break by all of society with its past.
Here we stand at the threshold of the ultimate paradox in the relationship between the
Jew and modernity. His defensive schools of thought have found themselves coming
to terms with ideas and social structures which were outrunning them, and the more
messianic doctrines soon acquired a certain shrillness, for they inevitably assumed the
unwanted role of keepers of the conscience of the main modern movements. The last
doctrinaires of the Enlightenment and what followed after, the epigones of the true
faiths as opposed to their sullying compromises with the world, are to be found in
modern Jewish thought.
Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea, Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia and
Jerusalem, 1997, pp. 22-32.
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